No Bush gaffes, but plenty of holes

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist, 10/13/2000

e pundits can now stop waiting like orcas for George W. Bush to announce that the bombing of Antarctica will begin in five minutes to take out all the scientists studying global warming. Foreign policy is just not going to be Bush's Achilles' heel. As we saw in the second debate, anyone can go from a presumed booby to a prohibitive genius on matters abroad by agreeing with nearly everything President Clinton and Vice President Gore have done.

How quickly we forgot that in hyping these debates, Republicans have for years winked and nodded privately even as they railed publicly about the so-called liberal Democrats. You mean Bush was really going to disagree with Gore's vote for the Bush family's Gulf War or that Clinton and Gore made America the Sam's Club - or, rather, the Uncle Sam's Club - of arms for the rest of the world, sided with Israel, and signed free trade agreements without regard for human rights? I don't think so. No wonder Bush joked that the first half of the debate was a ''love fest.''

About the only time Bush sought

his own ground on foreign policy was a

good reminder why it is better to wink

than to wonk. He made it clear that Africa was way down his totem pole of priorities, to the degree of calling Nigeria an ''important continent.'' It is another side of the same cultural coin where Americans are taught to distinguish between the culture of Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and the British but lump Africans into an amorphous blob. The needle on the gaffe-o-meter would have gone ''Tilt!'' had Bush called France a continent.

With so much time having been lost waiting for a flustered Bush to flush himself down the toilet on the Middle East or Serbia, one wonders if it may already be too late to refocus the nation's attention on matters on which Bush has already proven himself to be indecisive and impassive, if not incompetent.

That began to happen in the second half of the debate in Winston-Salem when moderator Jim Lehrer finally moved to domestic policy. That gave Gore a chance to mess with Texas.

Gore put Bush on the defensive with data that found Texas to be at or nearly at the bottom of the 50 states in health care for children, women, and families. Bush did not directly dispute the rankings. Gore could have added that a federal judge ruled this summer that Texas had denied health care to 1 million low-income children, saying, ''A poor and often-isolated population should not be robbed of their right to services.''

There was the environment, where Gore nailed Houston for replacing Los Angeles as the nation's smog capital and Texas for being the nation's leading industrial polluter. Again, Bush did not directly dispute that. Despite emissions reductions enacted under Bush, Texas remains the nation's top industrial polluter.

Then there was bigotry. Lehrer still has not asked my favorite yet-to-be-asked question, which is, ''Governor Bush, you say you are a `uniter,' but how could you speak at Bob Jones University, a school that bans interracial dating, without a mention of such blatantly racist policies?''

But Lehrer did the next best thing by asking Bush and Gore about hate crimes. Gore brought up the gruesome murder of James Byrd in Texas and Bush's failure last year to support a new hate crimes law. Troubled by the inclusion of crimes against homosexuals, Bush gave the bill the silent treatment.

He stayed silent, hoping the Republicans in the state Senate would kill it in committee, which they did. Diane Hardy-Garcia, executive director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, said of Bush, ''His unconscionable, immoral lack of leadership on this issue is both tragic and exasperating.''

In the same legislative session, the same Bush who chickened out on hate crimes won $1.85 billion in tax cuts. When you put it together, you get an idea of what is in store for America.

It will get a president who dances with racists, then waffles, dawdles, and disappears on acts of racism. It will get a leader who issues $1.8 billion in tax cuts while Texas is at the bottom of the 50 states in delivery of health care and tied for the nation's third-worst dropout rate.

It will get in Bush and running mate Dick Cheney two men who have amassed millions from oil while citizens in Houston, Dallas, and El Paso bake in a smoggy heat. There is one more debate left and one more chance to cut through the haze. Forget the hole in the ozone of Bush's foreign policy. There is a much bigger one close to home. Just look how he has messed with Texas.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.